What Returning to Work Means in the Nail Salons of Orange County

FEBRUARY 23, 2022

Tens of thousands of people work in nail salons in Southern California. After two, often devastating, years, many of their customers still haven’t returned.

In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, after the fall of Saigon, thousands of people fled Vietnam and came to California. One of them, whom I’ll call Hanh at her request, arrived in Orange County, in 1982. By her twenties, she was working as a manicurist in nail salons, making around three dollars an hour. Within a decade, she was raising four kids as a single mom. Orange County and Los Angeles County are home to around seven per cent of all the nail-salon workers in the United States—more than forty thousand people, nearly all of whom are women, and around three-quarters of whom are Vietnamese. A large number of manicurists are independent contractors who get paid by the customer and can be fired at any time. Typically, salon owners will keep around forty per cent of a bill and workers will keep the other sixty, plus tips. Hanh compared it to fishing: you eat when you catch something. Manicurists tend to move around a lot, and, for most of the past few decades, salons were constantly hiring. Hanh, who is a youthful fifty-eight, became adept at applying acrylics, which made her a desirable employee.